Closing the Left/Right Divide in Canadian Politic,Essay Example

One common description of Canadian politics is that it lacks an ideological party structure. Usually, the most enduring and difficult divide in Canadian politics belongs to the ethnic difference of English and French. However, Canada has always been a country with party activists and members who are driven by ideological concerns expressed in terms of their party’s policy and left/right ideas are no different. The issue for Canadians is that the left/right divide appears to be most important to the few Canadians that are party members and activists and less important to those who are not so only the views of a few are reflected in Canadian policy. This paper looks at why it is the most important divide in section one, the causes of the divide in section two, and suggests a solution to the ending the debate in section three. The paper argues that the best way to remove this divide is to make an electoral system that allows for more diverse opinions and forces coalitions, namely a proportional representation system.

Most Important Division

The left/right divide is the most important divide because it fully encompasses Canada’s most politically active citizens and is part of their belief systems, as such, prevents more centralized views of most Canadians from making it into policy decisions. Yet, unlike many other countries, Canadians are not that much interested in becoming members of political parties. In the 2004 Canadian Election Study less than 20 percent of Canadians have been members of a political party, and less than 10 percent will ever help out in a campaign (Cochrane 583).

Part of the reason for the divide’s importance is that in the terms of Philip Converse, each side has hunkered down into its own belief system. Converse defines a belief system as “a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some for of constraint or functional interdependence” (Converse 207). By constraint Converse means how well people can predict how easy it is to predict that given an attitude on one issue that the person’s attitudes on other ideas can be predicted also (Converse 207). There are two more critical aspects of belief systems, one is the role of centrality, or how important one idea is to the entire belief system the person has. For example, if someone is in support of the Bloc and it were to change a key platform, like determining that separation was no longer a goal, how would the person respond to that one change. A second critical aspect is “the range of objects that are referents for the ideas and attitudes in the system” (Converse 208). Some belief systems have a wider range than others do. In the case of the political debates over conservative versus socialist politics the room for changing political outlooks is quite small.

Thus, Canada’s most politically active are charged by their own belief systems and then translate that into action in political parties and a desire to see policies that reflect their own beliefs. Cochrane looks at the divide between left and right by examining their social learning, which considers that political opinions derive from social circumstances like family upbringing or class. The gap in beliefs between the two is large, given that if one side is ranked as 1 and the other its theoretical polar opposite at 20, on economics, social and immigration they are between 9 to 15 points apart (Cochrane 589). This is a divide that has been shaping Canadian politics.

The Division Between Conservatives and Lefties

Historically, according to the Hartzian view, Canada was a new society that included fragments of European ideals (Horowitz 143). Thus, it is fair to speak of the liberal individualism and the British tory influence as well as the feudal elements of hierarchy and corporate societal structures that linger in Francophone society. Since there was no new dynamic among the new founders, their ideology did not change in the new setting. As Horowitz suggests, it became fixed, “congealed at the point of origin” (Horowitz 144).

Canada is a liberal society, so one can argue that the real fight in Canada, or the ideological struggle is between “big-propertied liberals on the right and petit bourgeois and working-class liberals on the left” (Horowitz 148). However, the tory and socialist ideas are still there. For example, both tory and socialist ideals remain as part of the broader liberal consensus in Canada but are not huge in the sense that they have not engendered movements that could in any way challenge the hegemony of the liberal tradition. That is until recently.

Until the late 1970s, the fluctuation between the Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservatives vacillated between the left/right positions trying to attract as many non-ideological voters as possible. So in many of the elections between 1945 and 1979, in eight out of the twelve, one survey picks up that the Conservatives were to the left of the Liberals (Cochrane 591). In the 1980s, the divide widened more because the Reform Party and the NDP changed their party platforms reflecting even more ideas that were further from the center. Cochrane argues “Canada’s major political parties were divided ideologically in the latter decades of the twentieth century to an extent that they had not been divided previously” (Cochrane 591).

It was in the 1980s that the big split in the left/right divide came and there was noticeable ideological disagreement between the parties (Cochrane 591). Politicians trying to win office need their devoted party members to help them get elected, and since the people are most likely members of the party who are more ideological, for a politician to win his or her riding, they need people who are strong ideologically. They also will not compromise, which means that they are not likely to want to be in a coalition that is not filled with like-minded people. Therefore, Cochrane suggests, “the structure of policy opinions among left-wing and right-wing activists may well bear in important respects on the political prospects of left-wing and right-wing parties” (Cochrane 592).

The left side of Canadian politics on economic and social issues is more stable than the right side, because the right have groups that are divided into different groups because of their positions on social issues like immigration and welfare (Cochrane 592). This is shown in Cochrane’s study where the party members of the NDP link their ideas about economics and social issues because of equality, but this is not the case with the Alliance when he looked at their responses (Cochrane 596). Rather, the right economic ideas about free markets do not affect their ideas about social issues (Cochrane 597). The differences in left and right issues overall maintain the divide.

How to Change the Left/Right Divide

Since the findings are that party members are constraining the choices of their party leaders, which means that party members that are positioned on the left/right divide have ore influence, solutions must be found to lessen that influence so that policy is reflecting more of the center views of Canadian people. One path to lessen the effects of the left/right divide in Canadian politics is to change the voting system to proportional representation (PR).

The PR system works best because it is designed to represent in parliament the people of a country in “exact (or nearly exact) proportion to the vote they polled” (Blais and Massicotte 41). The list system would allow it to be streamlined to the Canadian context, because the system comprises five aspects each of which can be changed, including: districting, formula, tiers, thresholds, and preferences for candidates (Blais and Massicotte 45). For those opposed who might argue that there would be too many parties and splinter parties that have no backing, a threshold could be applied to ensure that there is a limit to the number of parties that represent only the smallest number of right or left ideas (Blais and Massicotte 51). To remove the party even further from the process, the single transferable vote of the list systems can be applied to do away with party lists so that only the voters determine who gets the seats (Blais and Massicotte 53).

A PR system should more effectively capture the policy interests of Canadians and reflect those back on policy-making. According to Blais and Massicotte it allows for more “diversity of views to be given in the legislature and in government” (Blais and Massicotte 52). This becomes exceptionally important when one considers the fact that Cochrane found that there would be very little incentive for party members to have their leaders compromise or work well in coalition governments because they are so ideological. The proportional system would force more compromise.

Further, Gimpel points out that there is an argument to be made that party identification comes in three steps: that people first learn about groups they are members of, then they learn which groups align with which parties, and then they identify with that party (Gimpel 606). This is why party identifications last so long, they are really part of other identities that are also enduring. Gimpel also speculates that if this new idea about party identification holds, then there might be much more variation between the kinds of people that align with parties (Gimpel 607). This means that partisan attachments could change or be better represented in a proportional system where more parties are likely to form and would represent more ideas than the left/right divide.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that the most important divide in Canadian politics in the left/right divide because it represents the ideas of the party members who are ideologically driven in their beliefs more than others. Given their entrenched ideas about policy, there is little chance for Canadian policy to reflect the will of the larger Canadian population. The divide has been a part of Canadian politics back to the founding, since original ideas from Europe included the two extremes of right and left now visible in Canadian politics in political party form since the 1993 election. In order to end the reliance on left/right and include more voices, the papery argued for proportional representation to increase the number of parties, which reflects the wider opinion of voters, and should force parties to compromise their ideological-based policies reflected in left or right politics.

Works Cited

Blais, André, and Louis Massicotte. “Electoral Systems.” In Comparing Democracies 2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting, eds. Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi, and Pippa Norris. London: Sage Publications, 2002.

Cochrane, Christopher. “Left/Right Ideology and Canadian Politics.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revenue canadienne de science politique, 43.3 (Sep. 2010): 583-605. Print.

Converse, Philip E. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”

In Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964. Print.

Gimpel, Jim. “Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters.” American Politics, 1.3 (Sep. 2003): 606-607. Print.

Horowitz, G. “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation.” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Politics, 32.2 (1966, May): 143-171. Print.